I want to use my post to think about Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s suspicion over claims that software is a source of agency. It’s telling that she cites Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, all thinkers that are associated with a hermeneutics of suspicion. Broadly speaking, these figures are characterized as undermining the supposition of a given meaning through a less evident hypothesis. In other words, meaning as we think we know it actually conceals the truth. For example, Freud’s attribution of the symptoms of neuroses to repression and the workings of the unconscious, an empirically unverifiable faculty.
I bring this up because there are many ways that a hermeneutics of suspicion feels outdated. Suspicion doesn’t solve any problems or tell us anything concrete about the nature of things. It simply makes us question preexisting assertions. This sentiment can be noted in Alexander Galloway’s critique of Chun’s earlier essay “On Software…”. Galloway’s insistence on the machinic as essential to software instead of the ideological (something I will touch on more in my presentation), points to the desire to move away from suspicion as a mode of interpretation. To state that software is an analog for ideology doesn’t really tell us anything about the nature of software or its specificity as technology after all.
With all this in mind, I think that there’s something generative about the way Chun mobilizes suspicion. Primarily because her interpretation bypasses something like a deterministic view of agency in its suspicion of the claims made about software’s essential attributes. The proposition that software is a source of agency is most discernible in Adrian Mackenzie’s essay, where the author focuses more on the performative’s capacity for self-constitution and less so on the implications of the speech act’s conventional constraints—the fact that the performative is subject to preexisting practices and norms (constraints implicated in the objectification of agency and not just limited to Linux’s history of development).
To return to Chun however, her suspicion leads her to claim that source code is not so much a source, but a resource. This point is important because it disrupts the temporality with which code may claim agency in execution. If a source code’s functioning can only be accounted for subsequent to its execution, authorial agency is left undetermined. Consequently, this leaves an opening to think about software in terms other than a technical determinism.
At what point does suspicion turn into a conspiracy theory though? While there probably exists more complexity between the terms, I want to say that suspicion might be less determined in its ends than the conspiracy theory? Suspicion perhaps opens up a deterministic world view whereas the conspiracy theory reinstates it? For example, although Chun states that source code can only really be said to function after the fact, she doesn’t preemptively foresee the malfunction as imminent. Rather, the malfunction is only a possibility. Similarly, Chun doesn’t argue that software is essentially restrictive, just that its determined association with agency is.
I bring this up because there are many ways that a hermeneutics of suspicion feels outdated. Suspicion doesn’t solve any problems or tell us anything concrete about the nature of things. It simply makes us question preexisting assertions. This sentiment can be noted in Alexander Galloway’s critique of Chun’s earlier essay “On Software…”. Galloway’s insistence on the machinic as essential to software instead of the ideological (something I will touch on more in my presentation), points to the desire to move away from suspicion as a mode of interpretation. To state that software is an analog for ideology doesn’t really tell us anything about the nature of software or its specificity as technology after all.
With all this in mind, I think that there’s something generative about the way Chun mobilizes suspicion. Primarily because her interpretation bypasses something like a deterministic view of agency in its suspicion of the claims made about software’s essential attributes. The proposition that software is a source of agency is most discernible in Adrian Mackenzie’s essay, where the author focuses more on the performative’s capacity for self-constitution and less so on the implications of the speech act’s conventional constraints—the fact that the performative is subject to preexisting practices and norms (constraints implicated in the objectification of agency and not just limited to Linux’s history of development).
To return to Chun however, her suspicion leads her to claim that source code is not so much a source, but a resource. This point is important because it disrupts the temporality with which code may claim agency in execution. If a source code’s functioning can only be accounted for subsequent to its execution, authorial agency is left undetermined. Consequently, this leaves an opening to think about software in terms other than a technical determinism.
At what point does suspicion turn into a conspiracy theory though? While there probably exists more complexity between the terms, I want to say that suspicion might be less determined in its ends than the conspiracy theory? Suspicion perhaps opens up a deterministic world view whereas the conspiracy theory reinstates it? For example, although Chun states that source code can only really be said to function after the fact, she doesn’t preemptively foresee the malfunction as imminent. Rather, the malfunction is only a possibility. Similarly, Chun doesn’t argue that software is essentially restrictive, just that its determined association with agency is.
No comments:
Post a Comment